The Arab Spring initially brought hope for change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but the term soon became a misnomer. After the protests toppled several autocratic governments, many people recognized that the transition would be prolonged and difficult. In several countries, hope quickly turned into despair as political violence escalated. Yet, even as these events unfolded, the world was unprepared for the gravity of the post-Arab Spring civil wars. The consequences of these wars were simply unimaginable at the time. They brought about devastation and suffering on a scale unseen since World War II. How could this happen?

Authors

Deputy Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean - World Bank

Professor - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

In “The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East” Mark Lynch draws attention to the role of foreign interventions in the aftermath of the initial protests. He argues that regional powers used the Arab Spring as an opportunity to increase their influence in the region. A multitude of stakeholders from multiple countries intervened, in an uncoordinated fashion, where the Arab Spring uprisings were intense. Some of these interventions had humanitarian goals, but others did not, and provided military support to different sides in the conflict. The objectives of interventions also changed quickly as the situation on the ground evolved. Since interventions were often not neutral and favored different rebel factions, they created conditions for the competitive arming of rebels and financial support for rebel groups, increasing the risk of conflict intensification.

In our paper, we argue that military interventions that are non-neutral and non-humanitarian are problematic because they alter the probability of winning of the warring factions, either through direct military assistance or through incentives to raise war-related resources, or both. This in turn intensifies identity-based polarization by stoking inter-group antagonism through alienation and increases the probability of conflict. In addition, this type of intervention has the potential to increase the intensity of fighting and the associated casualties, as external support decreases the rebels’ dependence on local support and therefore their incentives to protect the local population.

Figure 1: Non-neutral and non-humanitarian foreign military intervention, polarization, and conflict by region (per country per period)

Data sources: IMI data (Pearson and Baumann, 1993) for foreign military interventions of non-neutral and non-humanitarian type; PRIO for conflict incidence; L’Etat des religions dans le monde and The Statesman’s Yearbook for religious polarization; WCE for ethnic polarization. Religious and ethnic polarization indexes, calculated following Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005), emphasize group sizes and assume that all groups are equidistant from each other.

The case of Lebanon illustrates this issue. Prior to the civil war, interventions started when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), after getting pushed out of Jordan following the ‘Black September’ of 1970, established a presence in Lebanon, disturbing the sectarian balance in the country. After 1970, interventions in Lebanon supported the Shia minority, which was pushed out of Southern Lebanon into the urban peripheries of Beirut. These interventions occurred in the context of shifting population weights and led to a struggle for political power, which resulted in a split into a pro-Nasser Sunni Muslim camp and pro-Western Christian camp and growing intergroup alienation, which increased religious and sectarian polarization. Eventually, a confrontation between the Lebanese Forces (LF) and the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) erupted and sectarian violence escalated, leading to further interventions in a vicious cycle that grew into a large-scale conflict.

Our paper provides evidence that non-humanitarian and non-neutral interventions intensify religious polarization through their effect on inter-sectarian alienation, increasing the risk of high-intensity conflict in MENA, but not in the rest of the world (Figure 2). In other words, even though religious polarization was not high at the beginning of the estimation period, foreign military interventions have a divisive effect on the behavior of rival sectarian groups. They increased inter-group alienation and therefore identity-based polarization along ethnic and religious lines. These findings are consistent with those of Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, who argues that transnational linkages and the attributes of neighboring states can affect the risk of conflict in a country. He finds that the risk of civil war is substantially higher in countries with many transborder groups on its territory or in countries neighboring fragile or authoritarian states.

Source: Abu Bader and Ianchovichina (2018) Journal of Development Economics (forthcoming). Note: MENA=1 denotes the effect for the countries in the Middle East and North Africa; MENA=0 denotes the effect for countries in the rest of the world.

Non-neutral and non-humanitarian foreign military interventions are only one factor among many that could inflame sectarian conflict. Domestic policies in many MENA states, such as repression and the use of sectarianism to prevent the emergence of cross-sectarian opposition fronts or to contain protests, have also stoked sectarianism.

Finally, it is worth stressing that not all types of foreign military interventions increase the risk of conflict. We find no such effect in the case of neutral and humanitarian military interventions, which are evenly distributed across regions and are much less prevalent in MENA than the non-neutral and non-humanitarian ones (see Figure 3). The unintended consequences of the latter provide one explanation for the “Arab Spring paradox” of peaceful protests in middle-income countries leading to sectarian conflict and violent civil wars.

Figure 3: Distribution of military intervention frequency by type and region (per country per period)

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